Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Aeon, 2005
Aeon is a newer electronically distributed magazine, which can be bought through Electric Story, Fictionwise, and other places as an e-book. The first issue appeared last year. They promised quarterly publication, and rather remarkably for a new magazine, they achieved that in their first year. The editors are Bridget and Marti McKenna.
The four 2005 issues included four novelettes and 26 short stories, totaling some 123,000 words. Two short stories were reprints, so about 118,000 words of the fiction were new. (One novelette was sort of a reprint, from a rather obscure electronic collection, but this new printing seems to be revised, so I list it as new.)
My favorite novelette was actually probably the quasi-reprint, Mark Bourne's "The Nature of the Beast", in which an aging Ann Darrow tells what really happened between her and Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll and especially Kong himself.
Of the short stories, my favorites were Bruce Holland Rogers's clever "Vocabulary Lesson", five short narratives such as those we might find on an SAT vocabulary test; Lawrence Schoen's "The Game of Leaf and Smile", about a contest between two demons on Halloween; M. Thomas's "The Tinker's Child", about a lonely man and the golem he makes to replace his son; and Jay Lake's "Green", about a girl trained to be a concubine for a corrupt immortal Duke.
There was also good work from Tom Doyle, Nisi Shawl, Carrie Richerson, and Ken Rand. This remains a fine new electronic publication, definitely worth trying out.
